This is one lengthy post :-)

Looks like there's an open issue in the SteemCommunity repo for this.

ref: https://github.com/SteemCommunity/steem/issues/12

So, this is why I am after the APM / logs etc. Apart from the logs, we also figured out that the TESTNET's payout time is lot more faster than the MAINNET. I have a rough idea about how to test this particular commit. But having access to the full RPC node with appbase like the steemit TESTNET will be helpful to test. Since it not economically viable to setup the entire platform, the best bet is to use the official TESTNET ( official-TESTNET = https://testnet.steemitdev.com/)